Tactical insights for first-time founders to outsmart the burn, the churn & the breakdown.
Hey Founder,
“Storytelling” sounds like performance, but your company already has a story, whether you shape it or not. You saw a problem, believed you could fix it, hired people, and started building. That part is straightforward.
Things fall apart when you can’t clearly explain what problem you’re actually here to solve and why it matters.
That’s when misalignment shows up: you promise one thing, customers expect another, and the team ships something else, not out of incompetence but because there’s no shared clarity.
This is where storytelling actually matters, not as inspiration, but as an operational tool. It keeps your roadmap grounded in real customers, helps teams make better trade-offs, and prevents strategy from dissolving into quarterly KPIs.
In this issue, we’ll make storytelling practical: one sentence that explains why you exist, and one simple storyboard to guide what you build, fund, and hire for.
Let’s go.
The Margin
Your team is shipping work that doesn’t move the story.
Think of an orchestra: world-class musicians with decades of training still need sheet music and a conductor, because without a shared reference point, talent turns into noise.
In your company, your team is the orchestra, you’re the conductor, and the story is the sheet music.
When that story isn’t clear and shared, work keeps happening - features ship, campaigns launch, decks get built - but none of it compounds into a coherent experience for a real customer. Activity replaces progress.
So what does “sheet music” actually look like in practice?
Airbnb famously mapped the entire guest and host journey as storyboards, frame by frame, and if a decision didn’t improve one of those frames, it didn’t ship.
IKEA is just as strict: if a product isn’t affordable, unintimidating, and easy to transport and assemble, it doesn’t exist.
Different companies, same principle - the story becomes the filter.
The pattern is simple:
map the customer’s real journey,
make it the team’s shared language, and
use it as the test for what you build, fund, and hire.
That’s storytelling as an operating system, not brand theatre.
Tiny Reframe
Storytelling isn’t branding. It’s the reason you exist.
Strip away decks, taglines, and theatrics, and a company story is simply this: who you exist for, what problem they keep running into, and what better outcome you’re responsible for creating, in plain language.
For example:
“We exist because small support teams keep drowning in unanswered tickets, and our job is to get them to same-day responses with less chaos by giving them one simple, shared inbox.”
That sentence isn’t marketing copy. It’s an operating rule.
If a roadmap item doesn’t make it more true, it shouldn’t ship.
If a hire doesn’t move that outcome forward, don’t make the hire.
If a deal requires you to pretend you’re something else, don’t close it.
Done right, storytelling gives you a veto line your whole team can use:
If this makes our story less true, we don’t do it.
Repeat it until decisions get easier.
Why You Should Care
When your story becomes the operating system, everything gets lighter.
Decisions get faster and less personal, because debates stop being about opinions and start being about one question: does this actually match what we exist to do? That alone kills a surprising amount of internal drama.
Work also gets sharper. Big initiatives are forced to answer a real test - which moment in the customer’s journey does this change, and how will we know? If there’s no clear answer, it’s probably just activity dressed up as progress.
And expectations finally line up. Marketing, sales, and delivery tell the same story. Customers get what they thought they bought, and retention, referrals, and upsell happen without motivational slogans.
This isn’t about being more inspirational.
It’s about wasting less time building things no one would miss if they disappeared.
4 Margin Moves to operationalize your “Story” this quarter
1. Turn your “why we exist” into a veto line
Write this once, in plain language:
“We exist because [customer] keeps running into [specific problem], and our job is to get them to [better outcome] by [how we do it].”Put it at the top of your strategy or roadmap doc and make it explicit: if an initiative would make that sentence less true, it doesn’t ship. Your story stops being a paragraph and becomes something you can say no with.
2. Break the customer story into a simple storyboard
With your team, sketch 10–15 moments your real customer goes through, from first pain to real outcome. Not personas like “SMBs,” but an actual human with constraints, fears, and trade-offs.
In roadmap or OKR meetings, add one question: Which box does this change? If no one can point to one, it doesn’t go on the roadmap. No new process, just a better filter.
3. Work on the highest‑friction moment first
Look at the boxes and ask three questions:
Where do we lose the most people or trust? (drop‑off)
Where are outcomes wildly inconsistent? (variance)
Where did a small tweak already move numbers a lot? (leverage)
Pick the box that scores highest.
Only projects that improve that moment are “must-do.” Everything else is consciously later. That’s how focus actually shows up.
4. Anchor big hires and projects to the story
Change one line in the docs you already use.
For projects: Which customer moment does this improve, and how will we know?
For senior hires: Which one or two moments will this person own and make better?
If the answer is “all of them” or “not sure,” you just avoided an expensive misalignment
Tough Love Corner
A subscriber shared this problem:
“I’ve somehow ended up paying wildly different salaries for basically the same role. Comp evolved ad hoc. How do I fix this without blowing up morale or our burn?”
This is common and fixable. The mistake is starting with salaries. You start with structure.
First, define levels. Pick 4–5 clear levels for the role and place people based on scope and impact, not tenure or who negotiated hardest.
Then set salary bands using market data and place people within those bands based on actual performance. Solid performers sit in the middle, consistently strong ones trend toward the top.
Fix gaps gradually, not dramatically. Bring under-band people up over one or two cycles, and freeze over-band comp until ranges catch up rather than cutting pay.
When the framework is ready, communicate simply:
“We’ve standardised levels and ranges, so compensation is fair and consistent. Here’s your level, the band, and what progress to the next level actually looks like.”
People don’t need a speech. They need predictability, fairness, and a clear path forward.
Got a burning founder question?
Send it my way, just hit reply.
Founder’s Toolbox
A few sharp reads this week:
Before you go…
A lot of founders feel pressure to perform storytelling, to sound bigger, bolder, and more confident than they actually feel. But strong storytelling doesn’t come from stage presence. It comes from conviction.
And conviction only shows up when you’ve stayed with a problem long enough to understand it deeply.
Jobs didn’t obsess over fonts or edges because of taste. He cared about “computers that feel human,” so every detail became an expression of a painfully clear problem and a painfully specific customer. That’s the sequence: depth of understanding → conviction → clear story. Never the other way around.
So if you want to be a better storyteller this year, don’t start with polish. Start with the problem. Name it precisely, map the story around it, and let that story decide what you actually do.
That clarity is the moat.
See you next Thursday,
— Mariya
What did you think of today’s issue?
Hit reply and let me know. I read every single one (for real).
About me
Hey, I’m Mariya, a startup CFO and founder of FounderFirst. After 10 years working alongside founders at early and growth-stage startups, I know how tough it is to make the right calls when resources are tight and the stakes are high. I started this newsletter to share the practical playbook I wish every founder had from day one, packed with lessons I’ve learned (and mistakes I’ve made) helping teams scale.
